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Neil Young Looks Back on ‘Treasure,’ Aims for ‘Archives 2’ Release in 2012

Neil rejoices on playing with Buffalo Springfield, and has plans for a third Archives release, dubbed:  “Archive part 2” .

Billboard writes:

by Gary Graff, Detroit | June 14, 2011 9:30 EDT

Neil Young says that his latest archival album, “A Treasure,” will be the first of many similar projects that will use unauthorized video material to enhance and flesh out the music that’s on those releases.

“Anything that anybody puts out there is fair game for me,” Young tells Billboard.com. “I can now use and I will continue to use on all my ‘Archives’ projects from now on any defining performance from any (source) synced up to the sound that I like.”

For the video component of “A Treasure” — which documents his spirited 1984-85 tour in support of his country album, “Old Ways” — Young used material shot by fans that he found on the Internet, syncing up the musical performances he selected from 85 concerts recorded during the tour. Some songs are incomplete and filled out with still photos or the album cover in lieu of live footage; others feature players different than those who are on the audio recording. But Young says he enjoyed the challenge of putting all that together.

“We wanted to bring as much of the experience, from a historic, archival perspective, as possible,” he says. “If I can see a band play a song and it’s not the same version, I will sync it up and make it work so that you get a feeling of what was actually happening during the day when it was done. Now I have all these videos of things I did a long time ago…that I will sync up with my archival studio tracks and take people on a trip back there, where it was happening. There’s something really cool about that.”

“A Treasure” and the tour that it comes from hold a special place in Young’s heart because was playing, he says, with “probably the most accomplished set of musicians that I ever played with, as far as just the expertise and the defining ability each one of them has.” They included legendary fiddler Rufus Thibodeux (who passed away in 2005), pianist Spooner Oldham and longtime Young cohort Ben Keith, who worked with Young in assembling “A Treasure” and even came up with the title (“After we listened to it, he said this is a treasure, Neil,’ ” Young
recalls) before passing away in July of 2010. The tour also coincided with the lawsuit filed by Young’s label, Geffen Records, accusing him of making albums that were “not ‘commercial’ and…musically uncharacteristic.” Both it and Young’s countersuit were eventually dropped in 1985, but the litigation clearly fueled Young as he hit the road the previous year.

“We had no support,” Young recalls. “I was being sued by my record company… and I also had been told by (Geffen) that country radio would never play this. So we really started to let out the shaft and just go for it. I was out there doing it myself and playing it for people who were loving it, and we were having a great time living high off the hog and just flying down the road in buses and just never stopped for about a year.”

The experience also included playing new and as-yet unrecorded songs, some of which were written during the tour and five of which — “Amber Jean,” “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking,” “Soul of a Woman,” “Nothing Is Perfect” and “Grey Riders” — appear on “A Treasure.” “The band could learn a song in half an hour, and we could play it that night,” Young recalls. “There’s nothing these guys couldn’t do. This was a band that could play anything and play it right away, so there was no delay. That was perfect for me.”

Young says there are “several” other original, unreleased songs that do not appear on “A Treasure” for space reasons. He says some of those may show up on his third “Archives” release, while he hopes to release “Archives 2” in 2012.

“We’re well into shooting the discs and getting the video ready for it and the interactivity and all of the content,” Young notes. “There’ll be different formats it’ll come out in besides Blu-ray this time that are the same resolution but new formats people haven’t seen before. There’ll be some Internet-based distributions that’ll be interesting.”

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Album Review: A Treasure

Neil Young
A Treasure
(Reprise, 2011)

It was September 1984, and I remember standing outside Charlie Starr in Springfield, Ohio, with a friend and a thousand other Neil Young fans. Charlie Starr was a nightclub with a honky-tonk theme and a parking lot that stretched forever—or long enough that if you were at the end of the ticket line that was moving at a glacial pace, you might wonder if you were going to walk in as Young was playing his final encore.

“I sure hope they have a ticket left,” I said from the end of the line. “After all, I drove here all the way from Cincinnati to see this, and I’d hate to drive back knowing I wasted my time.”
After a long silence, a half dozen people looked at each other with concerned faces and a young man finally broke the news to me. “Buddy, I hate to tell you this,” he said in a grave voice, “but this show’s been sold out for a long, long time.”

“You’re kidding,” I squeaked, hoping my face looked pale.

When my friend laughed, the charade was over—even I knew that if Neil Young is playing a bar (a very large bar, but still) tickets will evaporate immediately. Charlie Starr seated about 3,000 people, an unusual venue for him to play, but the choice made sense. Since the mid-1800s International Harvester produced farm machinery in Springfield, but the factory was in lay-off mode, as so many factories were in the mid-1980s. By bringing his International Harvesters to a smaller venue in the city, Young was showing some solidarity. And I ended up getting into that show.

That same spirit shines through on A Treasure, the latest release from Young’s vaults.

full article on Crawdaddy…

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Review: Buffalo Springfield added “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong” at Bonnaroo

At least according to this review at spinner.com…

Buffalo Springfield Have Their Greatest Night Ever at Bonnaroo

“We’re Buffalo Springfield . We’re from the past!” shouted singer Richie Furay at the top of his lungs, when the recently reunited band took the main stage at Bonnaroo on Saturday night. And he was right: this band has been gone for a very, very long time. Their last studio album was released in 1968. It’s been decades since their last tour. But that didn’t matter for this show. No, at this performance, it sounded like the classic rock legends had never taken a forty-plus-year break.

Playing almost exclusively from their three studio albums — ‘Buffalo Springfield,’ ‘Buffalo Springfield Again,’ and ‘Last Time Around’ — the group sounded in sync the entire night; surviving Buffalo Springfield members Furay, Neil Young and Stephen Stills showed exactly why the group was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. From ‘On the Way Home’ to ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’ to ‘Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It,’ they looked like they were having a blast up on stage, entertaining the tens of thousands that had come out to see them rock out.

But unfortunately, the set was not without its problems. The main complaint heard from the crowd was that the volume just wasn’t high enough. When you are pretty close to the stage at a concert for one of the more influential rock groups ever, there is no reason you should be able to have a clear and coherent conversation with your neighbor without screaming. Alas, you actually could, causing many annoyed Springfield fans to start chants of “Turn up the volume” and “Louder.” In the end, it didn’t work, and everyone had to live with what the current decibel level was at.

Yet that shouldn’t distract from the band’s overall performance. While it did lag a bit toward the middle, renditions of ‘For What It’s Worth’ (which fans didn’t immediately recognize in the beginning because it sounded a bit different) and Young’s ‘Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,’ showed why Buffalo Springfield was a breeding ground for other iconic classic rock groups ( Crosby, Stills & Nash , Poco and Young’s many other projects and bands).

And from how Young put it at the end, it was as much an important night for Buffalo Springfield as it was for the fans: “It’s great to see you all here,” he said. “We’re lucky to be here with you. This is the greatest thing we’ve ever done.”
___________________
Thanks go to Randy S.

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New Buffalo songs – says The Preacher

Iconic Buffalo Springfield Stampedes Into Bonnaroo
AP, Posted on Friday June 10, 2011

Richie Furay knows a little something about miracles in his new career
as a preacher.

A Buffalo Springfield reunion may not strictly qualify as a one. But like most folks he’d written off the possibility when the band famously flamed out in 1968, ending a short but incandescent run that would ripple through music for decades to come.

“People have asked me did I think The Buffalo Springfield would ever get back together again, and my answer was a short, ‘Never, it’s not gonna happen,'” Furay said in a phone interview last Saturday before the band’s soundcheck in Los Angeles. “That old saying, ‘Never say never,’ is true.”

The surviving members of the California quintet – Furay, Stephen Stills and Neil Young – will make their only festival appearance this year on Saturday at Bonnaroo, serving as a focal point for an event heavy on bands influenced by the folk- and country-rock pioneers.

Young first broached the idea of a reunion in a song, “Buffalo Springfield Again” from 2000’s Silver & Gold , and finally reached out personally last year to invite Furay and Stills to join him at his annual Bridge School benefit concert in October.

Fans cheered the reunion and, more importantly, the band enjoyed it.
Over the years their relationships sometimes bore the lingering strain of that 1960s breakup. But not this time. Things were so much fun, they made plans for a six-date mini-tour in California to warm up for Bonnaroo and have since announced a fall tour.

There’s a harmony these days that didn’t exist during the band’s revolving-door run from 1966-68.

“Nobody’s looking for a career move or anything,” Furay said. “This isn’t a career move. This is just a bunch of guys who played music together 40 years ago having fun, readdressing the music that we played, and there’s no agendas. … Man, it’s so much more relaxed and I am going to speak for Neil and for Stephen, we’re just having fun. There’s no reason to be doing this if everyone isn’t having fun and everyone’s having fun. We knew that back at the Bridge School. It was like stepping back in time.”

And it’s an exciting time to revisit. Buffalo Springfield held together just long enough to record one album together, one album apart and enough leftovers for a third.

In these few dozen tracks is a large portion of the DNA for today’s thriving folk- and country-rock scenes. Buffalo Springfield alongside groups like The Byrds helped meld sounds no one really thought belonged together at the time. Folk purists felt rock ‘n’ roll was abusive, and rock purists didn’t want to fluff up their music. And the country guys had no idea what to make of it all.

Buffalo Springfield – which originally included bassist Bruce Palmer and drummer Dewey Martin, who have both passed away – had just one big hit in its short run, but its commercial success was inverse to its influence. Tension in the band between Young and Stills and legal problems for Palmer led to the band’s split. Young and Stills went on to success as solo artists and together in Crosby, Stills, Nash & (sometimes) Young. Furay formed the influential country-rock band Poco with latter-day Springfield member Jim Messina before forming the nondenominational Calvary Chapel in Bloomfield, Colo.

The band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Songs like the band’s biggest hit “For What It’s Worth,” ”Bluebird,” ”Mr. Soul” and the iconic “Broken Arrow,” performed live for the first time during the reunion, with their topical themes and open-hearted intent, still resonate with listeners today – perhaps as much as ever. The band lived during a politically tumultuous time and reappears in a time that feels just as stormy.

“Just the faces have changed,” said Furay, who now lives in Colorado.

The ideas and influences of Buffalo Springfield can be felt every year at Bonnaroo, an all-genre event that nevertheless has a soft spot for roots rock.

You could easily call bands like Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists , Ray LaMontagne , Old Crow Medicine Show and many others in the festival’s four-day lineup distant descendants of Buffalo Springfield.

Organizers of Bonnaroo, which kicks off Thursday, think it was a coup to land the reunited act’s only festival date. It also was another chance to look forward by looking back.

“I think Bonnaroo has always been about presenting not only sort of what is current and breaking but also artists that have influenced a lot of the music that our audience is listening to,” Bonnaroo co-creator Rick Farman of Superfly Productions said. “And there’s always been a thing within sort of the rock world of looking back at the sort of predecessors, the ones who created the pathways for the new artists and sort of putting them up on a pedestal to be experienced in that way.

Saturday night’s performance will be Young’s first return to Manchester since a scorching 2003 solo show that Farman and his friends place among the top five performances in the 10-year history of the festival.

“That was a transcendent moment for the festival for I think a lot of us who produce it personally and I think for the audience,” Farman said. “So, you know, having him back and having him in this configuration is really exciting”.

Furay says it’s an exciting prospect for the band as well and perhaps just one in a long line of steps these old friends will take together. No one has committed to anything beyond the fall tour, but there are songs being written.

“We haven’t discussed, you know, ‘Hey, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to write 10 new songs,'” Furay said. “Neil’s so prolific anyway.  Stephen told me the other day he had a song. I’ve been writing music. So I just think it’s obvious that something may transpire like that, it may come to pass.”

–Associated Press

__________________
thanx to Randy S.

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Buffalo Springfield Backstage at Bonnaroo

POSTED: June 12, 12:45 PM ET | By Eric Helton, Matthew Murphy
ROLLING STONE

Before taking the stage in front of an incredibly enthusiastic crowd Saturday night at Bonnaroo, Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and Richie Furay sat down with Rolling Stone’s Patrick Doyle to explain how this shocking reunion came to be. “Neil and I were sitting down at lunch one day and were were talking about ‘let’s do something fun,'” Stills recalls. “I said, ‘let’s do Buffalo Springfield a the Bridge School.'” That was their first appearance anywhere since breaking up in 1968 – and it went so well they booked a bunch of dates this year that includes Bonnaroo. Stills thought that some of the younger fans at the festival might not know who they are. “They’re going to go, ‘wow, those old guys, look at them,'” he says. “‘Mommy, who is that old man?'”

Furay – who now works as a pastor at a Colorado church – is thrilled at the chance to create music with his old friends again after so many years. “It’s really neat to reconnect with these guys,” he says. “When we were young we didn’t know what we were doing. I don’t remember the bickering and the fighting…I think people want to add something that wasn’t there because lots of times it’s more fun if there’s a little dirt.” Furay says that the band has “30-plus” dates for the fall – a number the freaks Stills out. “They better have a break in there,” he says. “If we had this much trouble with six, I can’t imagine 30.”

:: Video of the discussion at rollingstone.com.

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